About
The island of the dead in Venice.
Just across the waters from Venice's Cannaregio district lies an island with red walls which houses the city's dead. Since the early 1800s, it has been the only officially recognized Christian burial grounds in the city, having been established when the independent Republic of Venice was taken over by Napoleon in 1797. This brought a number of changes for Venetians, most notably that people could no longer be buried within city limits and that the gates to the Jewish ghetto were to be kept open throughout the day. The traditional method for disposing of bodies had typically been putting them in churches or beneath paving stones, neither of which was considered particularly sanitary or suitable for a region with frequent flooding issues. In some cases, those who succumbed to plagues were sent to isolated islands before even dying.
